2024 in many words and some photos
It has become a tradition for me to look at the year that's about to end. I did so in 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015 and 2014.
So here comes the 2024 edition (later than usual, but I still date it to the correct year).
My year in numbers
I attended 4 conferences this year: Rust Nation UK in March, Oxidize in May, RustFest Zürich in June and EuroRust Vienna in October. And while I didn't attend PyCon DE this time, some of my colleagues did and I met them for food & drinks afterwards.
The only talk I gave was a fun lightning talk at work about the adventures of Little Bobby Tables.
I traveled a lot. To Valencia for a Drift Masters event, to Oslo for the Biathlon World Cup, home on several occasions, to Toronto for a work week, to Dublin for a Mozilla All-Hands, to Mozambique for vacation and to northern Norway for some quiet time. I didn't count the distances traveled.
I wrote 11 blog posts, plus the one you are reading (which is technically being finished in 2025). That's a good increase over the last 2 years as I tried putting out things without spending weeks and weeks on editing (and then never finishing it).
I don't know how many books I finished. Maybe 2 or 3? It's still a thing I want to get back into more. There's a pile of books in my apartment and more on my e-reader.
GitHub says I made 1720 contributions in 2024. A lot of automated commits included. I'm now hosting my own forge, so some commits never go to GitHub and stay private. At work as usual contributions are spread across GitHub repositories, our internal Mercurial server and a whole bunch of documents, meetings and chat discussions.
The ~/Pictures/2024 folder now contains 3968 pictures. Probably 1000 less with the dupes removed.
My iPhone photo library counts 5094 pictures for 2024.
There's a whole lot of overlap.
I should get my backups of all of these properly automated.
Since I've been keeping a private archive of my Mastodon activity it's now easy to count: 1464 toots over the year, 819 of those as replies to others.
I did 13 dives. 2 in Valencia, 11 in Mozambique. That's a good number for just 2 trips. Let's see if I can keep up with that in 2025.
I don't have good tracking of my workouts anymore. I did try to keep a regular cadence of 2-3 workouts (A mix of HIIT and Core workouts) per week among the weekly Handball training. The latter of which I'm still leading as the coach, so I don't get as much training done myself. A hand injury, some sick days and the travel made it harder to keep the streak going.
My year in photos and words
I spent the first week of the year in Tallinn with Flaki, before I headed back to Berlin. The 2024 European Men's Handball Championship was happening and I got myself tickets for the 3 game days of the Preliminary round of Group D. That group included Norway (of course), but also the Faroe Islands. Their fans were spectacular and the team managed to score a draw against Norway.
In January I went to a concert of Goldroger. I went to school with that guy, so seeing him on stage in front of hundreds of people was something different.
On a whim I bought a ticket to the Enter Shikari concert in Berlin in February (recording not from that concert, but from the same tour). While I knew them before I never followed their music much. That changed with the concert.
The day after I flew to Norway. As a kind of joke in December the previous year I asked my family if they would join me for Biathlon in Oslo. My dad and my sister said yes. So that's what we ended up doing February. Now I'm signed up to volunteer at the Holmenkollen Skifestival in 2025.
In March I headed to London. It's been a while since I visited, so I took that opportunity to do some sightseeing, including a Jack The Ripper walking tour. And of course I ate at Mei Mei (twice!)
The actual reason for the trip however was the Rust Nation UK conference. Me at a Rust conference as an attendee, no work or organizing involved. Still weird.
I came back to spend Easter with my family, before I took my nephew with me to Berlin. He wanted to visit the big city and get some time away from home. We went to another Füchse Berlin game.
That same month I dislocated a finger on my right hand in the second-to-last game of the season. My whole right forearm was in a cast for a week and it took several more weeks before I could return to proper training.
May then took me to Valencia, Spain. I accompanied Patrick there, where he took the opportunity to film the Drift Masters event happening at the Circuit Ricardo Tormo. I managed to sneak in 2 dives and spend a day at the beach on my own.
Motor sport, no matter what, is still not my kind of sport, but nonetheless the results of Patrick's work there and at other events are worth a watch. Go check out his latest video.
In June I flew to Canada to take part in a Data Org Work week at the Mozilla office in Toronto. There's only a few times a year to spend time with my team, so we made the best of this week with planning, discussions, ping pong, arcade games, food and beer.
Back from the Canada trip I barely got a load of laundry done before I took a flight to Zürich for my first RustFest Zürich. It was the second overall, after I couldn't attend the 2017 edition.
The team pulled it off and set up a small community event with great talks and fantastic attendees.
In July I made a surprise visit at my parents to celebrate my mother starting retirement, after which my parents in return visited Berlin (planned, not a surprise).
We then went back home together. From there I went further west to attend the wedding party of one of my closest friends. And it just happened that I met someone at this party and we hit it off.
There was no point going back to Berlin for a short time, because I was once again helping at the Juicy Beats festival in Dortmund just a week later. I stayed one more week so I could attend the bachelor party for my little brother.
A week back in Berlin allowed me to catch some of the summer days, but before I got to settled down I went to Dublin for the Mozilla All-Hands (or MozWeek as they relabeled it).
That whole ordeal was so exhausting that after I was back in Berlin I took the train up to Stralsund to get away and relax at the ocean once more. I enjoyed it so much that I spontaneously extended my stay by 2 days.
In late September Flaki came to visit Berlin, bringing along his two dogs Lumi and Iris.
That visit was all part of a trip all the way down to Vienna to attend EuroRust in October. The two dogs were the most calm fluffy attendees I've ever seen. I on the other hand was quite busy helping to provide internet for the conference and running the Q&A sessions after talks.
This year I seem to have packed all my travel close together. I again got less than a week back in Berlin before rushing back home. My brother got married and I had to be there. It was a great wedding and I wish the happy couple all the best!
For (nearly) all of November I stayed in Berlin. Finally. I managed to go to two concerts and then I got a visit from the special person I met a few months earlier at the wedding. Good food & good company made this month at home very worthwhile.
Then on November 29, Florian and I boarded a flight to Johannesburg in South Africa. Sibylle picked us up and we took a long trip over to Mozambique, with a day trip through the Kruger National Park.
The extended trip was chosen due to the still-ongoing protests and political crisis in Mozambique. A trip to the Kruger allowed us to use the more northern border post and thus avoid a drive through the capital Maputo.
When we made it to Barra Beach we were greeted by our hosts and friends Greg & Gwen from Aquaholics. We spent 2 weeks down there. In 11 amazing dives I experienced a lively, colorful and astonishing world under water.
After Mozambique I got back to Berlin for a day. The next day I hopped back on a train, heading home to spend Christmas with my family.
On December 27 I then started a long trip to northern Norway together with Dominik. I'm always checking the pictures from ofotfjorden.no, so it was time to see for myself. The picture above is looking roughly in the same direction as the Ofotfjorden camera.
On New Year's Eve we made it to our final stop all the way in the north of Norway. The tiny settlement we're staying in is called Steinfjord and it's a good place for some days in the quiet.
Just as 2025 was to break the Northern Lights came up on the sky.
They grew stronger as time went on, visible with bare eyes.
A perfect start into a 2025.
The Future
In retrospect writing this I realized just how busy my 2024 was. I don't think 2025 will slow down much. I'm still traveling at the moment and won't be back in Berlin until late January. I already have two further trips booked. And that's only in the first 3 months of the year. It looks like I will go to at least 2 Rust conferences again. At some point I will need an extended summer vacation again too.
Work will go on. 2024 was a turbulent year at Mozilla and it doesn't give me the highest confidence for Mozilla in 2025. Nonetheless I will continue to work on data things and ensure that we do that in a way that benefits the user. Glean just went through a major change and I have some work lined up to reduce memory usage and change the storage layer.
I'm still in the same flat as the year before and didn't really look for a new one yet. Maybe 2025 is the time for a move?
I now recognize when I didn't get to exercise for a while, be that for laziness, travel, injury or sickness. One thing I want to improve in 2025 is some form of workout schedule while traveling.
My year was busy, but all of that was enjoyable thanks to the people keeping me busy.
Thanks to so many people that traveled with me or came to visit. My dad & sister to Oslo. My nephew in Berlin. Patrick to Spain. Flaki in Berlin and to Vienna. My parents in Berlin and back home. Camille in Berlin. Sibylle, Wolfgang & Florian to Mozambique. Dominik to Norway.